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Business Lesson in India

By: Marijean Jaggers | 09/26/2008

Last week, my colleague Jennifer and I had the great fortune to travel to India to conduct some client work. While in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, we discovered that in restaurants, at our hotel and on the Indian airline we took, we were presented at every turn with customer satisfaction surveys. Asking for feedback was very common among all the customer service industry people we encountered. In fact, we learned that if we marked anything less than fives (for excellent) across the board, we would be asked why on the spot. In addition, more than once we heard the phrase, "It is an honor to serve you."

In the course of our work there, we asked our client what Western business people can learn from the Indian way of doing business. He said that Western business people need to learn to speak from the heart, and to demonstrate sincerity. This seems particularly poignant now, as I reflect on all we learned while doing business ourselves in India.

I can think of no better way to demonstrate sincerity to customers than to ask for feedback, and continuously strive to improve based on customer evaluations.

How do you demonstrate sincerity to your customers? Are you asking them for feedback?

Posted in Reputation Management, Reputation Management